Military superiority and escalating U.S. spending have not prevented a repeat of Washington's failures in its wars, making it unlikely that it will achieve a victory against Iran.
And who knows what wars and crises the future holds?
Afrasianet - Mazen Al Najjar - Yesterday it was Venezuela, and next week it could be Cuba or Greenland, or who knows where the next war will be?
And who knows what can be expected in our increasingly bizarre world from a president who, during his third election campaign, has repeatedly vowed that he will never go to war?
Recently, the Secretary of War, an office that, of course, could not be more explicit in the age of the unnamed Pete Hegseth, warned that "the future of Cuba is in the hands of the President of the United States and the leadership of Cuba. Whatever the case, the War Department will be on standby for any possible emergency."
The American historian and thinker Thomas Englehart notes that any possible contingency, except, of course, victory, which no longer exists in the American lexicon since the end of World War II, or, indeed, except for peace!
What could go wrong in a world that now includes the first trillionaire, Elon Musk, Donald Trump's sometime friend? Senator Elizabeth Warren commented brilliantly, saying, "I want to make it clear: This is not a coincidence, it's a feature of a manipulated economy."
What could go wrong on such a manipulated planet?
What could go wrong in a world where no American president seems to realize that wars will never be won by America, no matter how strong they are and the size of the Pentagon's ever-inflated budget, which could soon reach $1.5 trillion a year, is not a typo, if Donald Trump has a say in it?
Imperialist Wars
Donald Trump is still at war, or perhaps in chaos, with Iran, a country about 10,000 kilometers from Washington, D.C., that is critical to U.S. power on a planet that is suffering from global warming and soaring temperatures.
Iran has once again closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 25 percent of the world's oil and 20 percent of the world's natural gas passes, and Donald Trump has threatened to take control of the strait himself.
The horrible, even terrifying, logic of what Trump is doing now is clear, or should be, to anyone with the slightest knowledge of America's imperial history since its victory in World War II in 1945.
Still, people treat Trump as if he were a unique figure in American history, and in some ways he really is.
But it's quite different when it comes to American-style warfare. There, it seems like a boring part of a story, now more than three-quarters of a century old, about how the power that seemed to be the greatest power on the planet, in the long decades after World War II, simply couldn't win a war.
President Harry S. Truman threw us into a major conflict in Korea, about 11,000 kilometers from Washington, in 1950, and when the conflict ended three years later, the United States left the North Koreans about half of the Korean Peninsula.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy increased U.S. support for the French colony in Indochina, until its army was defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu to the rebel forces of leader Ho Chi Minh in 1954.
He then oversaw what would become a full-scale U.S. war in Vietnam, about 13,600 kilometers from the United States, as well as a war in Laos, which is also a similar distance away, and Cambodia, about 14,400 kilometers away.
The Indochina Wars lasted another 14 years, ending with a disastrous U.S. withdrawal, chaos and crushing defeat in 1975.
In 2001, President George W. Bush launched a war in Afghanistan, part of what he called the "Global War on Terror," a country about 11,000 kilometers from Washington.
This war lasted another 20 years before it ended, of course, in a crushing American defeat and a disastrous withdrawal of the last American troops from there, as part of a path started by President Donald Trump and completed by President Joe Biden in 2021.
In 2003, Bush launched a war on Iraq, about 10,000 kilometers from Washington, a conflict that President Barack Obama ended with another defeat in 2011, though Washington continued to engage in some fighting there later.
Raising military spending
Not to mention other U.S. war activities on the planet, including a never-ending air war in Somalia, which began with President George H.W. Bush's military intervention in the early 1990s and continues today with no sign of success.
So, to underscore this self-evident point, the greatest real imperialist power on the planet, and the only one left after the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991, has achieved little real war success since the end of World War II in 1945, until the current Trump moment, 80 years later.
Of course, we are talking about the country with the largest army on earth, and whose army spends money on it, which is still called "defense spending," even if the name of the ministry responsible for it is changed to the Ministry of War, more than the next six countries combined, and accounts for 33% of the world's total military spending.
Englehart calls for this to be remembered, before Donald Trump even tried to raise the country's military spending from nearly $1 trillion a year to nearly $1.5 trillion.
However, there is also talk of a power that has not won a war since the end of World War II.
No victory in Iran's war
Now, in light of all this, what should we expect regarding Donald Trump's war against Iran?
Of course, the president and his military are clearly capable of wreaking havoc there, as they have done in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They are also capable of killing huge numbers of Iranians and turning that region into a potential catastrophe.
Of course, President Trump is already insisting on reimposing a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, while describing himself and his country as the "protector" of the Strait of Hormuz.
But Englehart asserts that what history suggests is that Trump and his entourage will not, in fact, be able to achieve a victory in their war against Iran. When it comes to war and imperialist powers on the planet, the United States presents a horrific defeat story of our time, one that Vladimir Putin seems to be repeating in Ukraine.
This may explain why China, which is clearly the next imperialist superpower on the planet, is unwilling to go down a similar path. China fought a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979, fought border skirmishes with India between 2020 and 2021, and has beefed up its military and nuclear forces during these years.
Yet it appears to show little interest in following the usual imperialist approach to waging world wars, given the lesson the United States has taught by spending enormous sums of money on futile wars, decade after decade, up to this point. Perhaps the imperialist history of our planet has never seen such power or biography.
